I PAY MORE ATTENTION TO MY BODILY
FLUIDS THAN I USED TO
I pay more attention to my bodily
fluids than I used to.
Woodlore, paint spots, spoor. Learning
to read all over
again. What does that mean? Show me an
x ray
of my ancestors prophetic skulls’
hidden under the hearthstones
of the firepit I’m being consumed in
like a piece of mammoth meat
that once thought it was phoenix in an
ice-age.
Is it ready yet? Is it cooked? Spread
it around.
Dinner time. May your crops and your
colas never get bud rot.
Irish grace. Canadian style. But it’s
still got
too many leprechauns in it, though, for
my taste.
Ever see a red-tailed hawk wheeling and
wheeling,
as if it couldn’t get a cork out of a
wine bottle it was
trying to open, when, pop, the job is
done, and it slides
down its own bannisters and thermals
of air in a stairwell
of mirrors as if it were easier
watching your blood
unravel in water because an eddy pulled
it by the thread
of a rip cord on your emergency
parachute. See
anything yet that looks like the
moonrise of a mushroom yet?
And you watch this cinder in the sun’s
eye, this crazy
flakey star that shines from the inside
out
as if it emerged before Venus, of
course it did,
the star doesn’t go on stage before
the audience,
startling the soul over the road and
the cedar rail fence
past the soft bass wood grove huddled
up like refugess
against the border, birds on the
powerlines,
trying to touch their mother’s
fingertips through
electrical fish nets, you take it from
there,
over the darkening hills at the end of
the beaver marsh
with a treeline that’s putting too
much mascara on.
Must be a young treeline. A whisper,
honey, a whisper
of an eclipse, moonset on those eyelids
of yours.
It’s a lot harder to seduce somebody
with megaphone.
All those black holes. You shouldn’t
have any trouble
attracting stars. But look at that hawk
up there.
The way it spreads its wings out as if
it were
the standard gold measure of the sun
glowing down,
(Glowing. Cheap shot like the next rock
in a mindstream
I jumping across, but I’ll take the
risk.) Down
into an abyss where the Egyptians used
to believe
it died and it was up to them with all
their canopic jars,
ointments, and urns to make it rise
again. Heavy burden.
Bet they were happy to get that
calender of gravestones
off their chest. I can only imagine
grave-robbing looters
running riot through the streets of New
York
like debt collectors when there’s a
black out orgy
of burning cars and smashed windows as
if
they were beating their girlfriends up
for having
such beautiful eyes, with bars and
gates. Street orchids
booming in fire once every seven
thousand years
and the fire hoses trying so hard to
put them out
as if goodness and human decency
depended up them
like a loaf of farmhouse bread cooling
on an afternoon windowsill.
Of course, it does.As wide from horizon
to horizon, as that bird up there,
stretching itself out to infinity so it
can touch the sky
with the tips of its flightfeathers to
see if he can fly out of it
without having out of necessity of
optical misperception
as if the compass needle that runs
through its heart like the axis
mundi, (God, I love the Latinate basso
profundo of that
it makes me feel so smart I can almost
convince myself
I’m thunder for a minute or two.) Ta
da. A firefly
hits the transformer. Fireworks for a
hawk. Watching it fly
as if there nothing more meaningful in
the world than that.
Better stop here. I’m getting carried
away. That’s
what a spinal cord’s for. To tug on a
kite. Hold on tight.
Ghost of a windsock in an air pocket of
the moon,
or anchored in bay with the gleaming
fish hook allure
of the feminine principle of the world
taking a bath in her own grave
and the merest speck of a hawk running
down
out of her eye, the crumb of a dream,
the bismallah
and the whole point in the mole on the
cheek of what Hafiz longed for
nothing but a starmap of all there is
to shining
if you approach it as if you were
always on the inside of no way out.
PATRICK WHITE
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